February 14, 2013

For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arguing that the only reason anybody in America has the slightest doubts about immigration is because of the malign influence of one man, a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton.

A new battle has flared inside the Republican Party in recent days as supporters of more-liberal immigration laws wage a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit the influential advocacy groups that have long powered the GOP’s hard-line stance on the issue.

The campaign, largely waged in closed-door meetings with lawmakers and privately circulated documents, is another sign of how seriously many establishment Republicans are pursuing an immigration overhaul in the wake of last year’s elections, in which the GOP lost Hispanic voters by an overwhelming margin to President Obama.

Much of the party’s sharp language on immigration during the election campaign, which Republican strategists blamed for alienating Hispanics, was drawn from the research and rhetoric of the advocacy groups.

Now, Republicans pushing the party to rethink its approach to the issue are accusing those groups — Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – of masquerading as conservative. Critics say the groups and some of their supporters are pressing an un­or­tho­dox agenda of strict population control that also has included backing for abortion, sterilization, and other policies at odds with conservative ideology.

“If these groups can be unmasked, then the bulk of the opposition to immigration reform on the conservative side will wither away,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a leading organizer of the effort.

Officials from the groups say they are the victims of a smear campaign that unfairly characterizes their mission. They acknowledge that some key figures in their past held a wide range of views on population growth and abortion, as do some current members, but the groups accuse their critics of pushing guilt-by-association arguments to distract from the merits of the case for restricting immigration.

The groups have provided the intellectual framework and grass-roots muscle for opposing legislation that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants.

Well-funded and politically savvy, the groups produce research papers, testify at congressional hearings and appear frequently in the media to push for reducing immigration. Numbers USA reports that its members have inundated the office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) with 100,000 faxes this year warning him that his central role in pursuing changes in immigration laws could damage his future political prospects. ...

Conservatives who are taking on the groups, including Rubio, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and officials of the Catholic Church, argue that the three organizations are motivated by far different philosophies than many of their Republican allies realize. Among those views: that population growth from increased migration threatens the environment.

The Republicans orchestrating the campaign against the groups have long rejected their views on immigration, and liberal immigration advocates have long made a practice of attacking the organizations. Now, with such GOP leaders as House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) saying immigration legislation is a priority, some Republicans see an opportunity to loosen what they say has been the groups’ stranglehold on party orthodoxy.

Uh ... George W. Bush? Karl Rove? Grover Norquist? John McCain?

I'm fascinated by how impervious the world is to doing simple reality checks on assertions, such as by thinking briefly about the immigration views of recent Republican Presidents/nominees.

How exactly do Roy Beck and Mark Krikorian have a "stranglehold on party orthodoxy" compared to those guys who have all pushed more immigration? We immigration reductionists have managed to block disastrous initiatives by Bush and McCain by having better facts and logic, not by any stranglehold.

Rubio’s aides last week brought one of the organizers of the effort to undermine the groups, Mario H. Lopez, a party strategist on Hispanic politics, to a regular meeting of GOP Senate staffers, where Lopez distributed literature about the groups’ backgrounds and connections. Rubio also raised concerns about the groups’ leanings during a recent conference call on immigration with conservative activists.

Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, said the senator “has argued that some groups that oppose legal immigration should not be considered part of the conservative coalition,” adding that the “vast majority of Republicans strongly support legal immigration.”

Kevin Appleby, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an e-mail to The Post that “pro-life legislators should think twice about working with these groups, as their underlying goals are inconsistent with a pro-life agenda.” ...

The critics, however, argue that the three groups have misled conservatives. These critics point to reports on the FAIR and Numbers USA Web sites, for instance, that warn of environmental devastation from unchecked population growth, and they are circulating a 1993 report by CIS researchers sympathetic to contraception and the RU-486 abortion pill.

In the latest issue of an anti-abortion journal, The Human Life Review, the Hispanic GOP strategist Lopez accuses the groups of “hijacking” the immigration debate for their own purposes. He argues that population-control advocates “have built, operated, and funded much of the anti-immigration movement in the United States.”

“Those who seek to advance the pro-life cause should not allow themselves to be fooled by those whose work is ultimately diametrically opposed to the right to life,” Lopez writes.

The article has created a stir in conservative circles. It ascribes the vision behind the groups to John Tanton, a controversial Michigan-based leader in the “zero population growth” movement, who co-founded FAIR in 1979 and later helped start Numbers USA and CIS.

In a 2001 letter by Tanton being circulated as part of the current campaign, he laid out his idea to “move the battle lines on the immigration question in our favor” by convincing Republican lawmakers that “massive immigration imperils their political future.” The goal, he wrote, was to “change Republicans’ perception of immigration so that when they encounter the word ‘immigrant,’ their reaction is ‘Democrat.’ ” Organizers of the campaign against the groups found the letter at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, which houses Tanton’s papers.

And, boy, was Tanton ever wrong! Oh, wait ...

An aide to Tanton, now 78, said Tanton was unable to speak. But the aide, K.C. McAlpin, said Tanton was an “ardent conservationist” who was being targeted in a “sort of McCarthyism game that the far left has been playing and is now being played by some people who call themselves conservatives.”

I've never met the man, but if the SPLC/Rubio line is right about his influence, we ought to add Dr. Tanton's face to Mount Rushmore.

The dispute has prompted some tense encounters in recent days.

When word spread, for instance, that Rubio’s staff was bringing Lopez to the Senate aides meeting last week, other Senate offices contacted the three groups, each of which sent a representative.

“It was awkward,” said one staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. The staffer described the critics’ tactics as “over the top,” saying the groups have been a “great resource” for data, research and expert testimony.

Another testy moment occurred recently at the weekly conservative strategy session hosted by Norquist when Lopez stood to present his arguments. Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, spoke up to defend the credibility of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“I haven’t heard folks take on the substantive arguments CIS is making and saying why they’re wrong,” said von Spakovsky, who declined to discuss details of what happened in the off-the-record meeting. “Instead you just get these scurrilous attacks.”

47 comments:

From the environmental memory hole- Ed Abbey's 1988 essay "Immigration and Liberal Taboos": In the American Southwest, where I happen to live, only sixty miles north of the Mexican border, the subject of illegal aliens is a touchy one. Even the terminology is dangerous: the old word wetback is now considered a racist insult by all good liberals; and the perfectly correct terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant can set off charges of xenophobia, elitism, fascism, and the ever-popular genocide against anyone careless enough to use them. The only acceptable euphemism, it now appears, is something called undocumented worker. Thus the pregnant Mexican woman who appears, in the final stages of labor, at the doors of the emergency ward of an El Paso or San Diego hospital, demanding care for herself and the child she's about to deliver, becomes an "undocumented worker." The child becomes an automatic American citizen by virtue of its place of birth, eligible at once for all of the usual public welfare benefits. And with the child comes not only the mother but the child's family. And the mother's family. And the father's family. Can't break up families can we? They come to stay and they stay to multiply.

What of it? say the documented liberals; ours is a rich and generous nation, we have room for all, let them come. And let them stay, say the conservatives; a large, cheap, frightened, docile, surplus labor force is exactly what the economy needs. Put some fear into the unions: tighten discipline, spur productivity, whip up the competition for jobs. The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause. (Neither group, you will notice, ever invites the immigrants to move into their homes. Not into their homes!) Both factions are supported by the cornucopia economists of the ever-expanding economy, who actually continue to believe that our basic resource is not land, air, water, but human bodies, more and more of them, the more the better in hive upon hive, world without end-ignoring the clear fact that those nations which most avidly practice this belief, such as Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, to name only three, don't seem to be doing well. They look more like explosive slow-motion disasters, in fact, volcanic anthills, than functioning human societies. But that which our academic economists will not see and will not acknowledge is painfully obvious to los latinos: they stream north in ever-growing numbers

Ed Abbey's "Immigration and Liberal Taboos" continued:Meanwhile, here at home in the land of endless plenty, we seem still unable to solve our traditional and nagging difficulties. After forty years of the most fantastic economic growth in the history of mankind, the United States remains burdened with mass unemployment, permanent poverty, an overloaded welfare system, violent crime, clogged courts, jam-packed prisons, commercial ("white-collar") crime, rotting cities and a poisoned environment, eroding farmlands and the disappearing family farm all of the usual forms of racial ethnic and sexual conflict (which immigration further intensifies), plus the ongoing destruction of what remains of our forests, fields, mountains, lakes, rivers, and seashores, accompanied by the extermination of whole specie's of plants and animals. To name but a few of our little nagging difficulties.

This being so, it occurs to some of us that perhaps ever continuing industrial and population growth is not the true road to human happiness, that simple gross quantitative increase of this kind creates only more pain, dislocation, confusion, and misery. In which case it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally morally-generically impoverished people. At least until we have brought our own affairs into order. Especially when these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which - let us be honest about this - is not appealing to the majority of Americans. Why not? Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful-yes, beautiful!-society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see.

Yes, I know, if the American Indians had enforced such a policy none of us pale-faced honkies would be here. But the Indians were foolish, and divided, and failed to keep our WASP ancestors out. They've regretted it ever since.

To everything there is a season, to every wave a limit, to every range an optimum capacity. The United States has been fully settled, and more than full, for at least a century. We have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the old boat to be swamped. How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? (Howls of "Racism! Elitism! Xenophobia!" from the Marx brothers and the documented liberals.) Harsh words: but somebody has to say them. We cannot play "let's pretend" much longer, not in the present world.

Therefore-let us close our national borders to any further mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source, as does every other nation on earth. The means are available, it's a simple technical-military problem. Even our Pentagon should be able to handle it. We've got an army somewhere on this planet, let's bring our soldiers home and station them where they can be of some actual and immediate benefit to the taxpayers who support them. That done, we can begin to concentrate attention on badly neglected internal affairs. Our internal affairs. Everyone would benefit, including the neighbors. Especially the neighbors.Ah yes. But what about those hungry hundreds of millions, those anxious billions, yearning toward the United States from every dark and desperate corner of the world? Shall we simply ignore them? Reject them? Is such a course possible?

"Poverty," said Samuel Johnson, "is the great enemy of human happiness. It certainly destroys liberty, makes some virtues impracticable, and all virtues extremely difficult."

You can say that again, Sam.Poverty, injustice, over breeding, overpopulation, suffering, oppression, military rule, squalor, torture, terror, massacre: these ancient evils feed and breed on one another in synergistic symbiosis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity-and birth control. Population control. Our Hispanic neighbors are groping toward this discovery. If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable.Or if we must meddle, as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.

What's really going on here is that Rubio and his supporting cabal are mooting and using a straw man to defame Americans who oppose illegal immigration. These bastards will stop at nothing to keep their Big Money crony capitalist campaign donors shoveling in those campaign fund checks.

Liberals are wise and good people, and your only possible reason for opposing them would be the malign influence of evil racists. Therefore, no actual evidence need be put forward by anyone to refute you.

Well, Fair, Numbers USA and CIS are not conservative groups they are against a lot of legal and illegal immirgation since it hurts the average Democratic or Republican. All three groups have their liberals and conservatives, Mark Krikorian is more on the right. The Hispanic Gop group things that a liberal Catholic view is better than a liberal restrictionists view, Rubio will lose to a lot of conservatives that are tired of their city looking like Miami or El Paso or Los Angeles.

I worked with some of those groups several years ago, and I recall the leader of NumbersUSA having a double mortgage on his house, and ProjectUSA going under due to lack of funds. Not what I would call "well funded". These groups have influence because of huge numbers of Americans agree with them and are willing to contact their Congressman with their views.

Much of the party’s sharp language on immigration during the election campaign, which Republican strategists blamed for alienating Hispanics,...

Speaking of alienating Hispanics, doesn't the GOP alienate Hispanics with its endless War on Drugs, tax cuts for the rich, and cutting the size of the federal government? I thought Hispanics were rock solid against these issues. So I guess they will need to go after Grover Norquist and others who have a strangle hold on the GOP in order to get this changed and appeal to Hispanics.

Alex Conant, said the senator “has argued that some groups that oppose legal immigration should not be considered part of the conservative coalition,” adding that the “vast majority of Republicans strongly support legal immigration.”

I think most people support legal immigration. But the question to be asked of the public is this: "Do you want the United States to become a Latin American nation?" If people realized that Mexico has already sent more immigrants than Germany, Italy and Great Britain combined, and that Mexicans, not just Hispanics BTW, are on course for becoming 1/3rd of this nation, then their answer to the legal immigration question may change.

These critics point to reports on the FAIR and Numbers USA Web sites, for instance, that warn of environmental devastation from unchecked population growth.

Isn't that pretty much self explanatory?

It seems like Rubio's tactic is going to be to turn the Bible-thumping, pro-lifers against the evil pro-abortionist, population control guys.

I have the trump card for the immigration restrictionists. Just tie the immigration debate into Israel. Make the case that massive third world immigration to the USA will be bad for Israel. Once this issue is framed as whether or not it is good for Israel, you will win. Just look at how the GOP was able to rally the troops for a filibuster tonight over Hagel and his views on Israel. Get immigration framed in this manner, and you can't lose.

This has backfire written all over it. Make everyone believe the guy behind anti-immigration policies is a leftist. If that works, there a two paths. One is to get conservatives to abandon anti-immigration. The other is to awaken the environmentalists to the #1 environmental protection policy with widespread popular support: immigration restrictions.

The Republicans will fight for tax cuts for the rich, they'll fight to keep Chuck Hagel out of the Pentagon, but they won't fight to protect their own electability via immigration policy? How stupid can they get?

Why on Earth would Hispanics vote for Republicans anyway? Everyone knows that if an amnesty bill passes, the Republicans will only have supported it on account of their dismal failure in the last election. The Democrats will have supported it on principle. So why would Hispanics vote for the hypocrites instead of the true believers?

Also, does anyone else remember any anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Romney campaign in the last election? I don't. Just some stuff about poor people who don't pay taxes.

Quothe TFA:The goal, he wrote, was to “change Republicans’ perception of immigration so that when they encounter the word ‘immigrant,’ their reaction is ‘Democrat.’ ”

This is how they attack Tanton? Tanton's hard, cold, fact-based argument that renders immigration-liberalizing Republicans dead-to-all-rights to claim they are actually for the Republican party?

Since the world seems filled to the brim with blithering idiots in positions of public trust and authority as well as private concentrations of wealth mined from the social capital of the nation, I demand Sortocracy: Sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them.

Let them trash themselves and each other if they won't listen... just don't let them drag rational people down with them.

This party is gone, this country is gone. There's no hope. I wish you and the folks at VDare would be more blunt in coming out and stating the obvious, but I admire you for fighting down to the very end.

I have the trump card for the immigration restrictionists. Just tie the immigration debate into Israel. Make the case that massive third world immigration to the USA will be bad for Israel. Once this issue is framed as whether or not it is good for Israel, you will win. Just look at how the GOP was able to rally the troops for a filibuster tonight over Hagel and his views on Israel. Get immigration framed in this manner, and you can't lose. This is true, Hispanics Catholics don't support Isreal as much as evangelical whites.

What's really going on here is that Rubio and his supporting cabal are mooting and using a straw man to defame Americans who oppose illegal immigration. These bastards will stop at nothing to keep their Big Money crony capitalist campaign donors shoveling in those campaign fund checks.True 2/14/13, 6:21 PM

I think the claim that we are moral hypocrites for opposing something our ancestors did is quite bizarre.

It brings up more questions than it answers; Are we responsible for everything all of our ancestors did in history. Why are we responsible for this particular act (immigration years ago) and not others?

Deuteronomy 24:16 - Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.

Well, some of the GOP is just stupid. You hear Republicans complain about illegal immirgant in California but some are unaware that Texas has a problem too. You think that they would know that any state near the border has a lot of illegal immirgants but they don't. Republicans need to read more to find out that the reason why Republicans in Texas like Perry and Rubio in Florida pushed Hispanics is because both states particulary Texas relies on illegal immirgant labor. Not saying that Smith or Cruz is bad or the ex-black West but other Republican politicans in both states prefer large guestworker programs and some legalization for at least a guestworker labor force.

Another thing is the Tea Party has caused a lot of Republicans to see Dems as the bad guys, the groups mention above show that both parties are at fault as Mark Krikorian stated the immirgation issue is not right versus left but the elite-Democratic and Repbulicans versus everyone else.

"Conservatives who are taking on the groups, including Rubio, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and officials of the Catholic Church, argue that the three organizations are motivated by far different philosophies than many of their Republican allies realize."

Thanks for posting the Edward Abbey excerpts. And people didn't think of him as a conservative - he's more conservative than the entire Republican party combined. I remember - back in the 80s - when environmentalists were fond of quoting him. Now, they don't seem to be so enamored of him.

With the defeat of RMoney it must be clear to the rich in America that taxes are only going up.

So yet more immigration will be needed to keep profits high.

I can't for the life of me see why anyone our end of the spectrum would support the Republicans. They are a businessman's party. Always have been, always will be. It is the core of their being.

What the far right needs is a Nader to punish these bastards and to make it clear why they are being punished. The BNP and UKIP do the same in England to Labour and the Tories. It is the best chance the far right has to get results whereas in America RMoney can run on a tax plan which gives 94% of its benefits to the top 10%, call 47% of the country scroungers, declare he doesn't care about the very poor, enter a horse in the horse ballet in an election year, declare that corporations are people, run on cuts to medicare and medicaid while promising to increase spending on the military, free trade with everyone and anyone, run as being for foreclosures(seriously, look it up) repeatedly make fun of ordinary people, nominate an Ayn Rand dork as his running mate and still get us blamed for him losing the election on the basis of two words(self deportation) he said a year before the election despite the fact that he ran on increased immigration and was dog whistling as hard as he could that he would pass an amnesty "permanent immigration reform" in his first year in office.

Another thing is the Tea Party has caused a lot of Republicans to see Dems as the bad guys, the groups mention above show that both parties are at fault as Mark Krikorian stated the immirgation issue is not right versus left but the elite-Democratic and Repbulicans versus everyone else.

Yeah, anyone with a brain can see that the Republicans have always been pro-immigration. But immigration restrictionists will always try to portray the Republicans' pro-immigration policies as a recent development. We had amnesty and major increases in legal immigration under Reagan, but immigration restrictionists aren't bothered by this and pretty much view Reagan as a god. Really, it's pretty pathetic. The number of "immigration restrictionists" who care more about restricting immigration than they do about defending the Republican Party must be miniscule.

"Conservatives who are taking on the groups, including Rubio, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and officials of the Catholic Church, argue that the three organizations are motivated by far different philosophies than many of their Republican allies realize."

Grover Norquist really is a loathsome little shit, isn't he?"

Nonsense! Grover Norquist is a brilliant strategist and a patriot of the highest order! Besides, though he keeps it quiet, he's rumored to be a humble, spiritual man who prays several times a day.

Besides, his No Tax pledge and his outreach to the Muslim community have reaped incalculable rewards for the GOP through the years.

Norquist, who happens to be bilingual and who can recite the Shahada with as perfect an Arabic accent as Barack Obama, scored a major strategic victory for the GOP in the 2000 general election when his Muslim outreach efforts in the mosques of Dearborn put Michigan squarely in the victory column for George W. Bush.

Grover had the foresight to recognize that, just as with Latinos, Muslims are natural conservative voters. After all, they too are hard working, entrepreneurial social conservatives who pop out offspring faster than the mice who inhabit out-of-the-way spaces in stately old Connecticut hall at Yale.

Again, just as with Hispanics/Latinos, Grover's strategy of flooding the zone with freedom-loving, socially conservative, family values Muslim immigrants who flocked to the GOP like pilgrims performing the Hajj, turned out to be a masterstroke for our beloved Republican party. It's allowed us to run electoral circles around the dimwitted Democrats in Michigan for the last 12 1/2 years, and more broadly, to take back a major chunk of the upper Midwest!

Hispanics’ reliance on the government safety net helps explain their ongoing support for the Democratic Party. Indeed, liberal spending policies are a more important consideration for Hispanic voters than ethnic identification or the so-called values issues that they are often said to favor. “What Republicans mean by ‘family values’ and what Hispanics mean are two completely different things,” says John Echeveste, founder of the oldest Latino marketing firm in Southern California and a player in California Latino politics. “We are a very compassionate people; we care about other people and understand that government has a role to play in helping people.” That Democratic allegiance was on display in the 2010 race for lieutenant governor, when Hispanics favored San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, the epitome of an elite tax-and-spend liberal, over the Hispanic Republican incumbent, Abel Maldonado, despite Newsom’s unilateral legalization of gay marriage in San Francisco in 2004. La Opinión, California’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, cited Newsom’s “good progressive platform” in endorsing him. In the 2010 race for state attorney general, Hispanic voters helped give the victory to liberal San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris, who was running against Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley, a law-and-order moderate—even in Cooley’s own backyard of L.A.

The Repubs just want the current system but receive tax breaks and maybe cut the amount of welfare received but not actually reduce the numbers anymore like they did in the 1990's under Clinton since they were less Hispanics then. Bush even wanted illegal immirgants are social security.

I've been banned out of Fronline Mag since I mention that Rubio called us racists for opposing him which he did indirecty. So, yes Republicans don't want to face the music and I also stated that both parties are too blame for the messed.

This is a little off-topic, but you should check out Peter Turchin's article in Aeon magazine: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/peter-turchin-wealth-poverty/

He downplays it a little, but in the article (and, presumably, the forthcoming book it previews), the immigration restriction act of the 20s comes across as the single best policy the American government ever enacted.

Puerto Rico and Mexico are way ahead of Haiti, the average income in Puerto Rico is about 18,000 and Mexico 8,000 to 10,000 for Haiti we are talking about under 1,000 a year. Sure, you can get very low income in Mexico but it is classified as a middle income country and even the poor in Mexico that come up to the states are not that poor by world standards they just want to make more money.

Well, smear campaigns worked pretty well when the bad idea being pushed was invading Iraq and establishing a permanent state of war that justifies unlimited government power and no oversight. I can't see why it will fail when the bad idea being pushed is the more efficient importation of a replacement people (more specifically, a replacement working class who will take lower wages).

I recommend watching very closely to see what media organizations run with this smear campaign, and learning from it.

I think that Republicans have a good chance to win over huge numbers of Latino voters on an issue near-and-dear to their hearts; an issue that's been hanging over our heads for years, and that Barack Obama and most Democrats want addressed, and soon.

I am, of course, referring to the minimum wage, and Obama's proposal to increase it.

Increasing the minimum wage would placate many working Hispanic voters. It would affect them personally, rather than just be a sop to their sense of ethnic solidarity. To the degree it harmed job growth not a one of them would blame the higher minimum wage as the cause. Coincidentally, a higher minimum wage would stifle business demand for cheap immigrant labor. So supporting a higher minimum wage would both make the Republicans look more compassionate while, conveniently reducing the growth of the Latino population. Machiavelli would be proud. Meanwhile, an amnesty would increase the Latino vote, turn off massive numbers of white conservatives, and do very little to draw Latinos to the GOP.

Supporting a higher minimum wage is a far better strategy than backing amnesty, but the GOP won't support it because the business lobby is agin' it.

Supporting a higher minimum wage is a far better strategy than backing amnesty, but the GOP won't support it because the business lobby is agin' it.

It also wouldn't do any good, because they can't out-Democrat the Democrats. Why would Hispanics care that the GOP supports something the Dems already support, along with all the other things they like that the Dems are offering?

[Supporting a higher minimum wage] also wouldn't do any good, because they can't out-Democrat the Democrats. Why would Hispanics care that the GOP supports something the Dems already support, along with all the other things they like that the Dems are offering?"

No, there are Hispanics and whites who would vote Republican if the Republicans occasionally backed policies that helped the lower middle class. Many people understand that the government can't provide the working poor with everything, but they won't vote for a party that seems opposed to giving them anything.

Besides, there's still the other benefit from higher minimum wages: fewer business plans that rely on cheap immigrant labor for their success. Face it: there's almost no way we're going to reduce immigration anytime in the near future, or get the establishment to allow border enforcement. The next best option is to slow the flow via other means.

When you add lower-class whites to the equation, then yes: the GOP should pursue policies beneficial to them, because they have the potential of voting for the GOP at a rate greater than 50%. Hispanics don't. If a policy aimed at lower-class whites pulls in a few Hispanics, fine. But beyond that, the best thing the GOP can hope for from Hispanics is that they stay as uninterested in voting as possible.

"When you add lower-class whites to the equation, then yes: the GOP should pursue policies beneficial to them, because they have the potential of voting for the GOP at a rate greater than 50%. Hispanics don't."

True. My argument has never been that Hispanics are "natural conservatives" that Republicans have any chance of winning. But supporting a higher minimum wage would do something to help them win a few poor blacks and Hispanics, a lot of poor whites, plus anyone who cares about their plight. Recall that the minimum wage is paid to people who work - i.e., not to people who prefer to mooch off the system. For so many reasons, the GOP is shooting itself in the foot when it opposes increases in the minimum wage.

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